The blockchain may be used as a public ledger to store any type of information. Although, primarily used for financial transactions, the blockchain can store any type of information including assets (i.e., products, packages, services, status, etc.). The blockchain may be used to securely store any type of information in its immutable ledger. Decentralized consensus is different from the traditional centralized consensus, such as when one central database used to rule transaction validity. A decentralized scheme transfers authority and trusts to a decentralized network and enables its nodes to continuously and sequentially record their transactions on a public “block,” creating a unique “chain” referred to as the blockchain. Cryptography, via hash codes, is used to secure the authentication of the transaction source and removes the need for a central intermediary.
Since blockchain is a permissioned distributed data system, designed with strict privacy and security control, it is not easy to create analytics which provides insight for multiple parties. For example, questions raised by interested parties, such as, for example, how a party's business transactions and behaviors are as compared with other parties, may be answered by examining data in the blockchain and determining outliner/abnormal patterns of a party compared with other parties.
Most conventional configurations are designed to assume that data is relatively centralized with either full or less restrictive permissions. Analytics can be calculated from the data without any constraints. Most analytic approaches focus on data driven concerns, and blockchain combines data with certain characteristics, smart contracts, participants and other features. The blockchain offers a unique combination of characteristics conducive for creation of a “cognitive layer” as part of curated timestamped data that is both current and historical. However, such a combination of data creates new complexities in terms of exposing the data to coherent, consistent and machine learning and/or other processes.